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Travails with technology

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Instead of continuously plugging my nice big monitor and mechanical keyboard into my work Macbook Pro, I decided to setup a Linux VM on my home desktop so I could do the same things I can do on the Mac. As most of the things I work with are under version control, it should be relatively simple to switch between machines.

The main things I needed were:

Ruby on Rails with Postgresql

Latex

Python 3 and IDLE, along with some of the graphics libraries

I usually use Ubuntu, but for a change I decided to check out Linux Mint, a very popular variant.

Ruby on Rails

Based on a quick read of various blog posts, rbenv seems to be the tool more people now use to manage their ruby versions, so that’s what I decided to go with. ruby-build is also necessary to actually install ruby versions easily. Both repos and their instructions can be found on github.

Postgresql

To install Postgresql, I followed the instructions from their download page for Ubuntu. Linux Mint Rebecca is based on Trusty Tahr (Ubuntu 14.04), so I used that. It was also necessary to install the postgresql-server-dev-9.4 package as the pg gem needs it.

To allow my user to login with psql and do useful things, it was also necessary to create a postgres role with create db rights for my OS username.

This was easy. Install texlive from the package manager. I had a missing package later on but a quick Google search told me what to install. Can’t remember the package name.